The Mission, the Men, and Me Quotes

“By refocusing my mind on my mission, my responsibility to my men’s welfare, and then putting any thoughts of me completely out of the equation, I was able to recognize and adapt to a hauntingly familiar pattern of modern-day battlefield behavior while it unfolded in front of me (a leader misled by technology and misguided by hubris trying to make life-or-death decisions without the context of the guys on the ground). One”
― Pete Blaber, The Mission, The Men, and Me: Lessons from a Former Delta Force Commander

“the key to success on all battlefields—past, present, and future—has very little to do with electronic whiz-bang gadgets and top-secret technologies; instead, it’s all about how you think, how you make decisions, and how you execute those decisions”
― Pete Blaber, The Mission, The Men, and Me: Lessons from a Former Delta Force Commander

“The art of war is the art of out-thinking your enemy with strategies and tactics such as disguises, deception, diversions, and stealth”
― Pete Blaber, The Mission, the Men, and Me: Lessons from a Former Delta Force Commander

“As both men walked out the door, they simultaneously checked the chambers of their M-4 rifles. This was a reflexive habit that served the dual purpose of confirming a round was ready to fire if needed, and to cue each man’s psychological transition from the semi-relaxed, inside the compound mind-set, to the fully alert, all-senses-scanning mind-set required any time any of us headed out into the frontier.”
― Pete Blaber, The Mission, The Men, and Me: Lessons from a Former Delta Force Commander

“The question that high-ranking leaders always seemed to inject in any risk-averse-oriented discussion was, “Is it worth getting a man killed for?” Forty thousand people die on our highways each year, but when you get into your car each morning, do you ask yourself if driving to work is worth getting killed for?”
― Pete Blaber, The Mission, The Men, and Me: Lessons from a Former Delta Force Commander

“Risk aversion is a direct by-product of not understanding what’s going on around you, and by proxy, another version of “getting treed by a chihuahua.” Back then it didn’t seem to matter how important the mission was to national security; if there was any risk that a man might be killed or captured during an operation, the operation was deemed not politically worth the risk.”
― Pete Blaber, The Mission, The Men, and Me: Lessons from a Former Delta Force Commander

“Sir, do not land those helicopters [there],” Jimmy pleaded while pointing at the valley floor. “The current plan is not going to work out for you.” The chief of staff replied apologetically, “I know, Jim, but it’s too late to do anything about it.”
― Pete Blaber, The Mission, The Men, and Me: Lessons from a Former Delta Force Commander

“The Small Group’s obsession with actionable intelligence had turned into an intellectual straitjacket. By narrowly defining the target opportunities to a specific point in time and location, they were in turn making the actionable intelligence requirement theoretically impossible to satisfy.15 They failed to realize that they had time. They had plenty of time to build better situational awareness and discover the numerous options and opportunities available to capture UBL prior to 9/11.”
― Pete Blaber, The Mission, The Men, and Me: Lessons from a Former Delta Force Commander

“In all, seventy-six BGM-109C/D Tomahawk Block III cruise missiles were launched, at an estimated cost of $750,000 apiece, for a total of $57 million. 12 Most of the cruise missiles successfully hit their predesignated”
― Pete Blaber, The Mission, The Men, and Me: Lessons from a Former Delta Force Commander

“The enemy segregated itself into three tiers, with Al Qaeda (foreign Arabs) on top, Uzbeks and Chechens in the middle, and Afghan Taliban on the bottom. A caste system of sorts, where the Arab fighters actually forbade the Taliban from speaking directly to them.6 A rigid hierarchy, no communication, no shared reality, we’re in business, I thought.”
― Pete Blaber, The Mission, The Men, and Me: Lessons from a Former Delta Force Commander

“Both sides recognized that Ali Mohamed had one-of-a-kind skills and experiences to support each side’s uniquely self-serving interests. Both sides had independently come to the same conclusion: Ali Mohamed was not the type of individual they could trust to become a card-carrying member of their respective organizations. The tipping point was how the two sides reacted. Al Qaeda leaders were able to overlook Ali Mohamed’s lack of Muslim fanaticism and his erratic connections to the U.S. government because they couldn’t imagine how they could achieve their ultimate terror objectives without the mission-essential knowledge and skills that only he possessed. Ali Mohamed’s U.S. government handlers, on the other hand, just plain could not imagine. The result of the tipping point was 9/11. Ali Mohamed wasn’t directly responsible for the execution of 9/11, but it’s easy to imagine how he could have been directly responsible for preventing it.”
― Pete Blaber, The Mission, The Men, and Me: Lessons from a Former Delta Force Commander

“The archetypal example is portrayed in the 1991 movie Silence of the Lambs, where Jodie Foster, who plays a junior FBI agent, seeks out, listens to, and acts on information from a psychotic murderer named Hannibal Lecter. Despite the fact that Hannibal Lecter was serving a life sentence in prison while the murders took place, Jodie Foster’s character understood that Lecter had the same mind-set and many of the same life experiences as the killer she was trying to capture. Silence of the Lambs was just a movie, but if we in the United States had had someone like Hannibal Lecter who had the same mind-set and many of the same life experiences as the terrorists that masterminded 9/11, we surely would have tapped into his knowledge base, wouldn’t we?”
― Pete Blaber, The Mission, The Men, and Me: Lessons from a Former Delta Force Commander

“Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose;”
― Pete Blaber, The Mission, The Men, and Me: Lessons from a Former Delta Force Commander